Dev Diary - TGC - A Retrospective

Brett McCartney
On April 13, 2016

For those of you that read the forums regularly you’ll be aware that the team and I have been taking a bit of time to play the game as you guys do, not as developers hurtling towards a deadline – with a game that’s come a long way since it’s official release in September 2014 it’s important to do that. It’s very easy to get sucked into your little area of the game and forget about the bigger picture. I was keen for everyone to play the game as a whole again and it’s been a real enjoyable experience.

Doing that has given us some great in-sights about how the game has moved forward, how our knowledge of the cutting edge technology improved and how we incorporated feedback from the community to continue building a strong golfing experience on the three biggest platforms in modern gaming.

Having created something as successful as The Golf Club and getting the constant interaction with the community that strive for it to be the best golf game ever made, we often forget that we’re an indie studio, with a small team in comparison to others. What we’ve achieved on an indie budget in a short period of time is good for the team to reflect on. We were very proud of the Operation Sports awards we won at the end of 2014 but as the months pass those memories fade so we were lucky enough to add another to the cabinet this week when Microsoft awarded us the “Mega Sales Award” within the [email protected] program.

With all that in mind and knowing the community is always hungry and interested in our insights into building The Golf Club we’ve decided over the next few weeks to do a retrospective of each area of the game. A couple of community members will also be writing something about the improvements they’ve seen as well. We’re going to break it down into areas (Gameplay, Physics, Course Designer, 3D Art, Front End, Etc). Next week Laura will start us off with her insights into how the Front End and HUD started out, how it grew and how she wants it to improve moving forward.

Until next week,
Anthony